The invention relates generally to an electric utility communication system for remotely reading meters, controlling customer loads, and operating distribution equipment and, more particularly, to a system including a plurality of types of load management terminals, some with remotely programmable unique addresses, and a field installation terminal for testing and loading addresses into the load management terminals.
Electric utility companies are increasingly turning to communication systems in their continuing efforts to increase the reliability and control the cost of supplying electrical energy to their many residential and industrial customers. Such systems are used to remotely read customers' meters from a central location and to remotely control distribution equipment, as well as to effect remote load shedding during periods of peak energy usage.
In order to exclusively address a single customer location out of the multitude of such locations in an electric utility system, a communications terminal must be provided which responds to a unique address. Such a terminal is described and claimed in U.S Pat. No. 4,130,874 issued Dec. 19, 1978 to Stephen M. Pai and assigned to the assignee of this invention. The terminal described in this patent is an interactive two-way load management terminal which can efficiently perform a variety of meter reading and load control functions. However, the unique address is physically programmed into the terminal with wire jumpers or switches. It can be a time consuming process to open the load control terminal, select the proper settings, and reseal the terminal. The process is also prone to human programming errors. Another problem is that once the wire jumpers are installed, it is difficult to change the address.
Load management terminals such as described in the aforementioned patent are quite complex and can execute multiple load control and data acquisition functions as well as provide a large amount of status and error data. The manual testing of such devices thus becomes increasingly costly and complex, and can require large amounts of a skilled operator's time. Furthermore, load management terminals, when installed in the field, are electrically connected to the powerline and caution must be exercised in the testing.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a communication system which includes a load management terminal responsive to a unique address which can be more simply and reliably programmed. Furthermore, it is desirable to provide means for efficiently testing and assigning addresses to such terminals in the field.